Post-tests: New Rules

In educational parlance, the word post-test implies some degree of progress and success. New rules, however, apply to post-medical tests:

1.Try to stop laughing and attempt to connect with the seriousness of all this. Even though the little "breathe in" and "breathe out" faces were ridiculous, remember that they were there to remind very ill people (like me) what to do and when to do it during CT scans.
2.Think about the worst concentration camp story you have ever heard to get yourself to STOP LAUGHING. None of this is one bit funny.
3.Try to remember that blue urine is more a sign of the excretion of poisonous dye than a symptom of imminent renal failure.
4.Pretty much the same thinking (obviously with different anatomical terms) should apply to diarrhea so severe that it can no longer be called diarrhea. (Our medical friends can tell me if "chyme" is the correct word.)
5.Stop thinking that this is the worst of it, because things are only going to get worse - no matter what the results of today's torture turn out to be.
6.Keep wishing that years ago you had the chance to become a member of the medical profession rather than a teacher. This will take your mind off the fact that you will not live long enough to enjoy very much of your teacher's pension.
7.Stop gagging every time you see a can of anything liquid. Chances are very, very good that they only have banana-flavored barium drinks at imaging places. (Forgot to ask if it was kosher, but why wouldn't Lerman's Imaging look into this on their own?)
8.Try to forget that the grief on the technicians' faces actually had much more to do with you than with anything at all going on in their lives, especially when they shot poisonous dye through your veins (arteries?).
9.Do not tell anyone that you could not stop laughing even (or especially) when you imagined that the dye infusion was a very American, constitutional lethal injection for a convicted criminal.
10.Focus on how ridiculous it is for snow to be falling one week before we turn the clocks ahead.